Amazon.com Review
In his fever-dream novel
Deep in the Shade of Paradise, John Dufresne is a goofily, deliriously intrusive authorial presence. He's constantly popping in and declaiming upon his plot and its various themes (which are, incidentally, love and memory and family and Southern cooking.) Toward the end of the book he pronounces, "No characters are minor." This might well be the motto of the book, which is a ridiculously circuitous retelling of
A Midsummer's Night Dream, set in deepest Louisiana and cast with literally dozens of cousins. The central story is a love triangle: there's our hero Adlai Birdsong, his cousin Grisham Loudermilk, and Loudermilk's fiancée, Ariane Thevenot. Adlai pursues the beautiful Ariane through plot twists and philosophical digressions, into bars and bedrooms, and finally to the family's old estate where the wedding is to take place. Being a Southern novel, no wedding is complete without a death, and being a Shakespearean exercise, no wedding is complete without a play-within-a-play. Dufresne happily provides all this and more in a novel so completely imagined that in the back, there's an appendix like a capacious satchel, made to hold "items of passing interest."
--Claire Dederer
From Publishers Weekly
Imagining John Irving, William Faulkner, Flannery O'Connor or Max Shulman (or all of the above at once) on peyote juice only begins to evoke the dimension and energy of the seriocomic fantasies of Dufresne at his freewheeling, frenetic best. In his latest, a sequel (of sorts) to his 1994 debut novel Louisiana Power & Light, this talented writer creates rambunctious fun tinged with melancholy as he revisits the oddball and grotesque characters and exotic trailer park and plantation landscapes of the Louisiana bayous and byways. Conceived the day his daddy Billy Wayne died in 1988, Boudou Fontana (short for Bergeron Boudeleaux deBastrop) has an eidetic memory and the knowledge that he's the last of the Fontana line. His mother, hillbilly songwriter Earlene deBastrop Fontana, is a cousin of Grisham Loudermilk, who is marrying Ariane Thevenot at Paradise, the family plantation in Shiver-de-Freeze (chival de frise), a small political subdivision outside Monroe, La. Grisham, seeking one last carnal fling of bachelorhood, engages in a boozy, lusty coupling with nomadic, free-spirited Miranda Ferry, who then hitches up her Airstream trailer bound for destinations unknown, but only gets as far as the town park near Paradise. Meanwhile, Earlene's cousin Adlai Birdsong, 21 and still living with and cooking for his mother, Benning, and Alzheimer's-stricken father, Royce, is starved for love. Ariane, resenting Grisham's cavalier behavior, slips into Adlai's bed, and chaos erupts. Other over-the-top characters include a priest who enamored of Ariane's mother is having second thoughts about celibacy, a pair of Siamese twin girls (actually one body with two heads) who take a shine to Boudou and a veritable menagerie of other outr‚ bayou denizens. Memory, fidelity and destiny are paramount themes as Dufresne sheds warm light on the caprices of the heart and mind. The all-out quirkiness of Dufresne's sparkling second novel may put some readers off, but others will surely think this talented writer's time has come. 13-city author tour.
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